Partitioning and stuff

[Mozzer]

I just got a new 80GB hard drive today and I've spent a while installing Windows and various bits of software on a 40GB partition. Obviously as it's XP it has to be NTFS.

Now my cunning plan is to install Ubuntu on my old 30GB hard drive and use the other 40GB of my new drive as storage to share music, video and other files between the two operating systems.

The problem with this is that Linux cannot write to NTFS, so I thought I'd make it a FAT32 partition instead. However, on Windows I am unable to make the spare 40GB into anything other than NTFS.

Are there any solutions to this problem?

[Paradigm^]

If you have an old Windows 98 setup disk (I believe they're floppies, which may even be findable on the Interweb), it'll come with a formatting utility which will do FAT32.

I think.

[Playbus]

XP doesn't have to be on an NTFS partition. Although it's preferable to use NTFS if you plan to have any form of network security (or want huuuuuge drives), it will run just fine on a FAT32 partition.

I guarantee it.

I have several FAT32 XP machines at work.

You can't convert an NTFS partition back to FAT32 though. You'll have to delete it and re-create.

[Eccles]

You can get a Windows 98 boot disk (amongst others) from here http://www.bootdisk.com/ and use the format command.

Or you could use the ultimate boot cd (http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/). which it packed with computery goodness. It's well worth adding to your toolkit anyway.

Good luck.

Edit: Now I'm at work and can check (win2k at home), XP should give you the option of NTFS or FAT32 when you format through Disk Management (at least XP pro does). Alternatively this command should work:
format x: /FS:Fat32 (where x is the drive letter)

[Mozzer]

As I thought - on my previous installation I could format to either filesystem but it wouldn't let me this time. I assume it's something to do with the partitions.

So anyway I did that command line and it works... but so slowly! I must have been running it for about half an hour and it's only at 40% of 40GB... gah.

EDIT - crapcrapcrapcrapcrap. After about 2 hours it got to 100% only to tell me the volume is too big for FAT32. Arrrrrgggghhhh!!!

[Eccles]

EDIT - crapcrapcrapcrapcrap. After about 2 hours it got to 100% only to tell me the volume is too big for FAT32. Arrrrrgggghhhh!!!

You'd think that it'd warn you before formatting. Sheesh!

You've hit one of the FAT32 limits there. I think it's 32Gb under XP, if memory serves, that's probably why you didn't get the FAT32 option in Disk Manager. I should have spotted that.

Just partition the space into two. If you're feeling adventurous, you could use some of the space for the linux swap partition.

You can make the format go faster by adding a "/Q" switch. This just writes the file allocation table and other neccesary bits without formatting the whole partition. I'd only use this on a known good disk (i.e. not a new one) as it won't show up any errors, but since you already done it to 100%, go for it.

Of course you'll probably be able to use disk manager with a smaller partition, there's a checkbox to do a quick format.

[Mozzer]

Yeah I used disk manager to partition it and then quick format to FAT32. Cheers Eccles.

By the way, my old Windows drive was flagged up as C: when I installed Windows on the new drive so now I'm running off drive F:

If I changed it to C: (having changed the other one to P:) would it mess everything up?

[Eccles]

Yes, changing the system drive would cause serious problems. Unfortunatly windows is still heavily reliant on the drive letter system from DOS. Just have a look in the registry to see how many times f:\ is referred to! The only safe way is to re-install.

By the way, is your new drive set as the primary master? If your old drive is still the pri-master you may have problems later when you put linux on it, as the XP bootloader will be there.